ABSTRACT
The major philosophers of the early seventeenth century were engaged primarily with the metaphysics of time rather than the content of our temporal experience. Seventeenth-century philosophers, especially those devoted to some version of the new science, generally worked against this tradition to separate time from motion and the mind. The experience of time was relevant only because it secured the successive structure of duration and, for certain authors, the abstract or "imaginary" status of time. However, a decisive phenomenological turn was taken by the British empiricists Hobbes, Locke and Berkeley, who prioritized the origin of our idea of time over its ontological status. Although their accounts of temporal experience are diverse, incomplete and problematic, they set the stage for the more systematic and influential treatments of Hume and Kant. The major task of seventeenth-century philosophy of time was to reconcile our concept of time with emerging scientific programmes of Galileo, Descartes and Newton.
